Higher Education History Episodes

Between 1921 and 1948, every Southern and border state, except Delaware, set up scholarship programs to send Black students out of state for graduate study rather than admit them to historically white public colleges or build graduate programs in the public HBCUs. While the individual Black students often benefited from graduate education at top-tier universities, the segregation scholarships created hardships for those same students and took money that could have been used to build up the publi...

In 1974, Republican governor Ronald Reagan appointed educator Dr. Claudia Hampton, a Democrat active in her local NAACP, as the first Black woman trustee to the board of California State University. For the next twenty years Hampton would be known as the affirmative action trustee as she advocated for policies and budgets that would help support and diversify the CSU faculty, staff, and students. To discuss Dr. Hampton’s legacy, and the history of affirmative action in California, I’m joined in ...

Almost as soon as there were radio stations, there were college radio stations. In 1948, to popularize FM radio, the FCC introduced class D non commercial education licenses for low-watt college radio stations. By 1967, 326 FM radio signals in the United States operated as “educational radio,” 220 of which were owned and operated by colleges and universities. The type of programming that these stations offered varied widely, from lectures and sporting events, to various kinds of musical shows, b...

Scholar Merze Tate, born in Michigan in 1905, overcame the odds in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world,” to earn graduate degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University on her way to becoming the first Black woman to teach in the History Department at Howard University. During her long career, Tate published 5 books, 34 journal articles and 45 review essays in the fields of diplomatic history and international relations. Her legacy extends beyond her publications, as the ...

In the late 1960s, as college campuses became hotbeds of liberal protest, conservative college groups, like the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), and College Republicans, backed by powerful conservative elders and their deep pockets, fought back, staging counter protests, publishing conservative newspapers, taking over student governments, and suing colleges to remain open. Joining me in this episode to discuss the campus right in more det...

Days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and after months of increasing tension on campus, the students at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama occupied a building on campus where the Trustees were meeting, demanding a number of reforms, including a role for students in college governance, the end of mandatory ROTC participation, athletic scholarships, African American studies curriculum, and a higher quality of instruction in engineering courses. Joining me to tell the story of the ...

Just after midnight on May 15, 1970, officers opened fire on a group of unarmed students milling in front of a dorm on the campus of Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, killing two and wounding twelve. Although the shootings took place just a week and a half after the shootings at Kent State University, the Jackson State shootings never got the attention of those at Kent State, and when they did they were often described as a second Kent State, erasing the context of white supremacy a...